The Weekend Report

Well, no one saw that coming … or did they?

It was the scrappy little sci-fi thriller The Purge that emURGEd as the weekend movie favorite with an estimated debut of $36.3 million. Meanwhile, its presumed competition The Internship mustered less than 50% of its opening to rank fourth overall with $18.2 million.

Exclusive newcomers saw a couple of very encouraging openings, including the nonfiction Dirty Wars that cleaned up $62,200 from four excursions. The much-updated Much Ado About Nothing arrived with $197,000 from five new Globes.

The session also featured considerable and effective expansion for alternative product. The East, Frances Ha, The Kings of Summer and Love is All You Need continued to add playdates and hold their own against the mainstream wave.

Weekend revenues amassed roughly $155 million in ticket sales for a 7% dip from seven days prior and a sharper 15% decline from 2012. A year back, the openings of Madagascar 3 and Prometheus held sway with respective bows of $60.3 million and $51.1 million.

Let’s start with the obvious … the buddy comedy as we have known it is over … at the very least until a new dynamic pairing comes along to bring it back to life.

The other notion that emerges from the weekend dust-up is that the infamous declining 18-25-year-old crowd is becoming less visually literate. The dominance of The Purge most certainly had less to do with state-of-the-art technology than a high-concept premise that tapped into a youthful zeitgeist. Studio exit demos revealed 56% of viewers were aged 25-years and younger. Conversely, The Internship had just 39% of the same age bracket. One could spit-ball that a generation accustomed to seeing moving images on smartphones just might not be tapped into pictorial nuance The other factor that just might have contributed to the rush to see The Purge was a marketing campaign that emphasized its underdog status. Considerable ink was spilled to get across its very modest budget versus its high chill factor. Historians can cite similar positioning for the likes of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity (with which it shares a producer) as templates to the current June surprise. The film had top end expectations of $25 million and an unquestionable aspect of its wider popularity was its unforeseen female appeal with women comprising 56% of opening weekend viewers.

The Internship had a 50-50 gender breakdown and all the signals for a $25 million debut. The commercial chemistry of Wilson-Vaughan of The Wedding Crashers provided goodwill but that wasn’t a sufficient hook for a younger crowd that anecdotally were tweeting Friday night that the picture lacked the audacity and crudeness that many anticipated.